It’s been heartening to see the left coalesce behind Biden but there is still work to be done. At this point the right is so far out that they revel in caging immigrant children, and they support police brutality against minorities and protesters, and too many other wrongs for me to list here (tl/dr). It is clear that they don't care at all about social justice, that's an insult to them, as are virtue and empathy. These are the same people the corporate media lobs softballs to and thinks we need to try to understand.
If we weren’t so close to the election, and in such a perilous time, I would advocate for dialogue and listening to the different viewpoints of these people no matter how crazy they sounded to me, and hopefully getting them to listen to me. That’s a great skill to have and to cultivate, but this is not the time to do that, or to advocate for it. What we need to focus upon right up to November is unifying with other people on the left, whether or not they share your opinions. Too many of us lefties are not listening to, or trying to understand, other lefties who might not always agree with us. People who should be natural allies are considered unreasonable or too radical or too conservative. I hear people complain that those others won’t listen, but the listening has to go both ways. It’s a worthy use of your political time and energy. Let’s focus on what we have in common right now and save the pie for Joe the Biden’s inauguration. If we are ever going to have a just society the left needs to unify and to have an unwavering commitment to social and economic justice and strong democratic institutions. We may not agree on everything, but we have to agree on that.
The right understands better than the left that politics is about grabbing and holding power and they are ruthless because they are amoral. The left needs to realize that gaining and holding power is our number 1 priority too, and in the process WE WILL NOT sacrifice our morals. The common thread that runs from the moderate left to the far left in the party is our morality. We have to turn that to our advantage. When the Democratic Party sacrifices morality for expediency or monetary gain it weakens itself. That’s what Republicans do. If people want to vote Republican they’ll vote for a real one. If you are a moderate Dem look to person far to the left of you. Try to understand them--you won't have to go far to find a middle-ground. Of course the same goes for Dems on far left and people in the middle. Let’s stop the talk about “purity” now that the nominating process is over, or the castigating of “Bernie bros,” and recognize that we agree on the key issues before us: Getting Biden elected, taking Dem control of the Senate, and winning all the way down the ticket.
There will be no kumbayah moment with the white supremacists in the near future, and as the Ocher Ogre is making clear, white supremacy is not just a Republican party plank, it’s the whole damn platform. Speaking of Nazis, a big reason they were able to win in 1933 was that the leftist Social Democratic Party despised the Communists almost as much as the Nazis did. But the only group in the early 1930s that was actively fighting the Nazis in the street were the Communists. If they had found a way to unify with the Communists instead of compromising with the nationalists things would have been very different.
Frederick Douglass knew this well. We have to fight together in order to gain power, and we have measure how we use that power not according to what “people will quietly submit to,” but with the goal of establishing a truly just society: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both." It's impractical and unrealistic to try and convert the right in this moment--but you might find a lot to agree with a Bernie or Biden supporter if you both listen and recognize your common purpose.